Saving Rawls

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Will Wilkinson doesn't understand Rawls's just savings principle. I don't blame him. The problem has vexed philosophers since at least Kant's time. I've read quite a bit on the matter and still don't have a clear solution to the problem.

¶ I proposed a solution here, which I have since revised. The current version of the argument is here, although I don't think it will be the last; I still have doubts about the permissibility of a pension system dependent on payroll taxes paid by the currently employed to the currently retired, but that's another topic.

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The first thing to point out is that Rawls's principle of just-savings applies to the selection of principles of justice, and specifically leads to a qualification on the difference principle. It doesn't directly mandate specific institutions, but only indicates that, whatever institutions are chosen, they must ensure that a suitable rate of savings be maintained from generation to generation. By savings, as Wilkinson observes, Rawls means more than a budget surplus; rather he extends the concept to the institutions of a just society and the gains of science and culture. If society is understood as a "fair system of cooperation" extending conceivably into eternity, than the institutions that ensure justice in that society ?whatever they might be? must be saved for posterity. Certainly Rawls sometimes equivocates between institutional choice and choice of principles, but the end-point of the discussion about savings is merely the addendum to the difference principle on TJ 252-53. (All references are to the Revised Edition.)

But the question is not so much "how?" but "why?" Rawls conception of society, after all, is dependent on the contractualist's idea of reciprocity, and generations far removed in time can't be expected to reciprocate in any direct sense. In fact, the usual formulation of the problem of justice between generations has started from this befuddlement:

What remains disconcerting about all this is firstly, that the earlier generations seem to perform their laborious tasks only for the sake of the later ones, so as to prepare for them a further stage from which they can raise still higher the structure intended by nature; and secondly, that only the later generations will in fact have the good fortune to inhabit the building on which a whole series of their forefathers (admittedly, without any conscious intention) had worked without themselves being able to share in the happiness they were preparing. But no matter how puzzling this may be, it will appear as necessary as it is puzzling if we simply assume that one animal species was intended to have reason, and that, as a class of rational beings who are mortal as individuals but immortal as a species, it was still meant to develop its capacities completely.? (GS 8:20)

Immanuel Kant, ?Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose? in Kant: Political Writings, edited by Hans Reiss, translated by H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge University Press, 1991) p. 44

I suspect that some of Wilkinson's doubts (and Rawls's incongruities) stem from the insistence?inherited from Kant?to look back to the hypothetical first generation and somehow pull them into the social contract. Thus Wilkinson objects to Rawls's principle that "[w]e can require the parties to agree to principles subject to the constraint that they wish all preceding generations to have followed the very same principles" (TJ 111) by asking whether,

[i]f I?m in generation 1, I ask how much I wish generation 0 to have saved. Oh, but then, generation 0 will have been less well-off than generation 1. So then I have to assume I am in generation 0. But then the problem reiterates until I need to assume that I?m in the Pleistocene. What rate of savings do I want?

The cause of this reasoning seems to me to lie on the tacit or express reliance on the premise "that the earlier generations seem to perform their laborious tasks only for the sake of the later ones" or, as Rawls puts it, that "[i]t is a natural fact that generations are spread out in time and actual economic benefits flow only in one direction. This situation is unalterable, and so the question of justice does not arise." (TJ 254) Let's call this the "single direction of benefits" assumption.

The other relevant assumption to Rawls's theory is the "present time of entry" assumption: since the original position is to serve as ?a natural guide to intuition? (TJ, 120), it should not be thought of as "a gathering of all actual or possible persons", but rather as the point of view of those who, not knowing to which age group they belong, are nonetheless aware that that they are presently alive and, when the veil of ignorance is lifted, will be part of the same society as other deliberants. (TJ, 118)

If I know that I will not be a potential future person, but am a living, breathing human being at the time that the principles of justice are chosen, I will probably not feel compelled to choose conservationist principles that cover more than three or four generations into the future. Affection falls off quickly after that, and I don't know whether my line of descendants will thrive or whether I wil even want descendants at all. So the principles of savings that I choose will be at best limited, as Jane English observed in a 1977 article.

Rawls tries to get around this problem in several ways. First, he proposes that persons in the original position might have obligations to third parties. But that won't work because the original position is designed as a procedure of construction of moral principle among persons that find themselved in the "circumstances of justice"; third-party obligations and duties cannot be derived from the circumstances of moderate scarcity, etc. (TJ, 119)

Rawls' second proposed solution introduces a special "motivational assumption" in the original position. The parties are supposed to care about at least one person in the next generation, and each person in the next generation is to be cared about by at least one person in the former. The result is that the parties in the original position are no longer treated as individuals, but as representatives of family lines. In deliberating, they seek to advance the interests of the present and future members of their line, not only of themselves. But this goes against Rawls's postulate of "mutual disinterestedness".

[T]he postulate of mutual disinterest in the original position is made to insure that the principles of justice do not depend upon strong assumptions. [...] A conception of justice should not presuppose, then, extensive ties of natural sentiment. (TJ, 111-12)

The last option, that "the parties to agree to principles subject to the constraint that they wish all preceding generations to have followed the very same principles" (TJ, 111) seems more promising. But ultimately, it risks doing away with the present time of entry assumption, or at least make that assumption inoperative. If we are to assume what past generations did or did not do, are we not putting ourselves in their posistion and, in a rhetorical reversal, bringing them into the original position? Future generations are still left out, but wasn't the future of the society what we were trying to protect in the first place?

But why should present generations care about the future, even if they take the past into account, if the circumstances of justice don't obtain between contemporaries and those who won't be born for many centuries? If the circumstances of justice don't obtain, that's the end of the game; no justice need apply. Only beneficience can keep us from fiddling while Rome burns. Après nous, le déluge!

Continued in a subsequent post.



UPDATE: I clipped the post so it wouldn't take up so much space on the home page. The content is unaltered.